Report: Nvidia Planning GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Graphics Card

By
Matthew Humphries18 Jan 2019, 2:05 a.m.

The 1660 Ti would be the first Turing card to carry the GTX rather than RTX name, but it doesn't come without compromises. This card won't support ray tracing and will offer a noticeable performance deficit to the RTX 2060.

When Nvidia launched the RTX line of graphics cards last year, it created a clear distinction between last-gen cards (GTX) and the new current-gen cards (RTX). However, the waters looks set to get muddier this year with news that Nvidia is planning to launch a new GTX graphics card.

As VideoCardz reports, three different sources have confirmed that a new GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is in the works. Unlike other GTX-branded cards which use the Pascal microarchitecture, Nvidia is going to use the new Turing microarchitecture which is currently reserved for RTX cards. The one big difference being that the 1660 Ti will not support ray tracing, therefore differentiating it from the higher end RTX models.

Clearly, Nvidia is going to position the 1660 Ti as a new budget offering and a sign that it intends to more clearly differentiate budget and high-end graphics cards in the future. For the 1660 Ti, the performance gap to the RTX cards will be clear. It uses a 12nm chip, a 192-bit memory bus, and 6GB of GDDR6 memory just like the RTX 2060 and RTX 2070, however, the CUDA cores are limited to just 1,536. For comparison, the RTX 2060 has 1,920 cores, and the 2070 has 2,304 cores.

Nvidia is ending production of its last-gen GPUs, which means card availability will diminish pretty quickly. The 1660 Ti is clearly meant to be the replacement for those who can't afford the more expensive RTX cards, but what price will it carry?

An RTX 2060 costs around $350 and the GTX 1060, which the GTX 1660 seems like the replacement for, costs in the region of $250-$300. With that in mind, I'd expect Nvidia to price it around the $285 mark, but we're always going to get variations in spec from the different manufacturers. A cheaper compact version of the card could also appear.

About the Author

Matthew is PCMag's UK-based editor and news reporter. Prior to joining the team, he spent 14 years writing and editing content on our sister site Geek.com and has covered most areas of technology, but is especially passionate about games tech. Alongside PCMag, he's a freelance video game designer. Matthew holds a BSc degree in Computer Science from Birmingham University and a Masters in Computer Games Development from Abertay University. See Full Bio